Image – Flickr/Forest and Kim Starr
The trunk of Brazil, a plant also known as a water stick, is widely used to decorate the interior of a house because although it can grow very tall, it takes up very little space. However, sometimes it’s hard to know what you need and/or whenso it should come as no surprise that one day its leaves begin to turn yellow.
The leaves are the most vulnerable part, and therefore one of the first – often after the roots have already been attacked or damaged in some way – to show signs that something is wrong with the plant. For it, we are going to explain to you how to recover a trunk of brazil with yellow leavesand we will do this by talking about the possible causes and their treatment.
Contents
The roots are literally drowning
Image – Flordeplanta.com.ar
I’ve been writing on this blog since 2013, and more than once someone said things like that they had their trunk from Brazil in the water, or in a pot with no holes. This is a problem, because brazil trunk is not an aquatic plant; that is, we cannot put it, for example, in a container without holes and expect it to be valuable because that will not happen. The roots are not prepared to live in an aquatic environment.
Nor should you make the mistake of planting it in a pot with holes and putting it in a pot or putting a plate under it and always keeping it full of water.because the result would be the same: the death of the root system.
But now let’s imagine that we have it in a suitable pot, and that we take care that the soil is not always wet; In this case, how to identify what is wrong? Good, what we will see will be the typical symptoms of excess waterto know:
- The leaves will begin to turn yellow, starting with the lower ones.
- The stems (false trunks) can soften and even rot.
- The plant stops growing.
- The substrate (soil in the pot) looks and feels very moist.
So how do you salvage a trunk from Brazil that has yellow leaves due to excess water? It’s not easy, but we can try. and that’s why what we must do first is take it out of the pot and wrap the earthen bread (mold) with absorbent paper. If it gets wet too quickly, we’ll take it out and put in another one. Then we will leave the plant in a dry and protected place overnight.
The day after, we will spray the plant, and especially the roots, with a systemic fungicide. We will put on rubber gloves to avoid direct contact with the product so that problems do not arise. Then we will plant it in a new -or at least clean- pot with a new quality substrate, such as the universal Fertiberia or Flower substrate.
And finally, we will water.
From here, what can we expect? The yellow leaves will eventually dry out and can be removed, but if we detected the problem in time, new ones will appear. Now it is important to reduce the frequency of watering so that this does not happen again.
The plant is thirsty
Another possible cause for your plant to have yellow leaves is that it is thirsty, and that This may be because little water is irrigated, little water is added to it, or the soil does not absorb said water well. In each of these three cases, we will see that the leaves that suffer first are the most recent.
How to save the chest of Brazil? Is it possible? Fortunately, if our plant is thirsty, it is enough to water it. But of course, if the earth does not absorb it, that is to say if we see that when watering the water it goes quickly towards the space between the earth and the pot, and that it comes out quickly through the holes in the pot, we will not be able to hydrate the trunk of Brazil. In this case, what we are going to do is take the pot and immerse it -note: only the pot, not the plant- in a container, such as a basin, filled with water for at least half an hour.
On the other hand, if little water is poured during watering, the roots located lower down will not be able to quench their thirst either. So every time we do it we will have to pour water on it until it comes out through the holes in it.
The question that remains to be solved now is how often you should water it, and it will depend on whether we have it at home or outside and the weather. But overall, It is important to keep in mind that the hotter it is, the less it will take for the soil to dry out, so the frequency of irrigation will be greater in summer. and lower in winter.
Low ambient humidity – Exposure to drafts
These two causes, although different, are sometimes closely linked, since even if the ambient humidity of a dwelling is high, if we have the Brazil tree near the fan or the air conditioning, said humidity will drop. And that’s a problem, because forces the plant to transport water faster from the roots to the leaves, with the aim of keeping them hydrated. An unfortunately futile attempt, because the air currents, if they are strong and/or constant, gradually dry out the environment.
Therefore, if we have our plant exposed to drafts and we see that the tips of the leaves turn yellow, What we’re going to do is move it to another location.
Now it can happen that the only problem is that the humidity is very low. In this case, it will be enough to water its leaves with water – rain if possible, or clean for consumption – every day, in order to keep them hydrated.
Need more space to keep growing
It’s a subject that doesn’t seem to be given too much importance, but When we have plants in pots we must bear in mind that sooner or later we will have to plant them in larger pots. so that they can continue to grow, especially if these plants can become very large, as is the case with our protagonist.
And it is that if we keep a brazilwood in the same container for years, we will considerably reduce its life expectancy, since there will come a time when it will lack space and nutrients. Therefore, if we suspect that what is happening to our factory is precisely that, we will see that apparently everything is fine, but the leaves are starting to turn yellow.
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In addition, the roots can come out through the drainage holes of the pot, and you can even see that the soil is very worn. To prevent it from weakening, it will have to be planted in a pot about ten centimeters in diameter and deeper than the one it currently has, every 3 or 4 years.
The leaves are burning
Image – Wikimedia/David J. Stang
Another possible cause is that we have the plant near a window, for example, and it burns. This is an easy problem to identify and also easy to solve, since damaged leaves will only be those most exposed. And to prevent it from getting worse, it will simply be necessary to move the trunk from Brazil to a more protected site.
We won’t get the yellow leaves back to their original colorbut we can make the new leaves grow well, healthy and green.
Brazil’s trunk is cold
Low temperatures pose a risk to the life of the Brazil trunk. Being a tropical plant, we must not leave it outside if in winter the thermometer drops below 15ºCotherwise it will suffer more or less damage depending on how cold it will be.
In fact, it’s one of the main reasons it’s considered a houseplant in Spain, as well as other temperate regions of the world, so do not hesitate to put it inside the house as soon as autumn arrives.
There are several reasons why the trunk of Brazil can end up with yellow leaves. I hope what we have discussed here helps you to be healthy.